"In an account that both travels over explored territory and covers new ground, Charles Rosenberg provides a vivid and complex history of a key institution. Rosenberg divides The Care of Strangers into two periods: the pre-Civil War era, before the advent of modern medicine, and from the war to the 1920s, by which time the had assumed modern form. The underlying theme of the book is that hospitals are a product of the interaction of and physicians. Hospitals were dominated by reformers as long as medical science was weak. But with its rise and the subsequent power of physicians, reformers and their social welfare goals faded."